Harold Shipman

Dr Harold Shipman 1946-2004

As a serial killer, Dr Harold Shipman displayed great proficiency, having murdered at least 215 people. As a forger of wills, he was woefully inept, producing documents that were obviously phoney. Thanks to this incompetence, the general practitioner was unmasked as a mass murderer - and probably prevented from killing even more people.

In 2000, Dr Harold Shipman, a trusted GP in the Manchester suburb of Hyde, was convicted of killing 15 of his patients. He was given 15 concurrent life sentences.

At the same trial, he was also convicted of forging the will of Mrs Kathleen Grundy, the last of his murdered patients. Four additional years were added to his sentences for the forgery.

As a legal matter, the forgery conviction is trivial, especially compared with multiple murders. The four years added to his 15 life terms is technically relevant but had no practical effect.

But this forgery was crucial to his murder convictions. Without Shipman's brazen attempt to concoct a will with three forged signatures - the testator and both witnesses - he probably would have remained free to find new victims.

Early warning signs

Born in Manchester and educated in Leeds, Shipman practiced medicine in Todmorden, West Yorkshire before settling in Hyde.

Shipman had been very close to his mother Vera, who died aged 43. His father died, apparently leaving his estate to Shipman's sister and younger brother - and nothing for Harold.

He apparently committed the murders over a 23-year period, starting in  Todmorden and concluding - with his arrest and conviction - in Hyde.

Most of his victims were elderly women in good health, but he also targetted middle-aged men and even children.

His preferred method was lethal injection of medicinal heroin.

Shipman had a personal as well as professional affinity for drugs. Early in his career, he was caught prescribing the painkiller pethidine for his own recreational use. His punishment was attendance at a drug rehabilitation programme.

He continued practicing medicine, and ultimately he killed at least 215 people, probably killed 45 more, and possibly murdered even more.

Could Shipman's murderous ways have been detected earlier?

In fact they were.

Three months before Shipman killed Mrs Grundy (March 1998), a local GP told the coroner that Shipman appeared to have an unusually high rate of patient deaths. She also passed along the observation of a local funeral director that many of Shipman's deceased patients were elderly women who lived alone.

The police investigated and found nothing amiss. (These investigating officers were inexperienced; the formal Shipman inquiry criticised police officials for not assigning officers with more experienced and higher rank.) Shipman went on to kill three more patients before being arrested.

Forgery: A How-Not-To

Shipman's forgery of Mrs Grundy's will had two contradictory characteristics - it was both well-planned and sloppy.

Shipman employed two main phases: first, obtain testator and witness signatures to provide samples for forging; then, send the will to solicitors.

For the first phase, he needed to obtain signatures of Mrs Grundy and the people whom he would use as witnesses to the signing of the will. To accomplish this, Shipman conconcted a non-existent medical research project, convinced Mrs Grundy's to participate in it and, to the end, obtained her and the witnesses signatures on the consent form.

In addition to providing Shipman with the signatures, this research project - as the Inquiry notes - also provided Shipman with an excuse to visit Mrs Grundy at home. It seems to me that this particular medical-experiment ruse had another purpose: it required Mrs Grundy to provide a blood sample. It gave Shipman a reason to insert a needle into her.

In the second phase of Shipman's will-forgery scheme, he posted two letters to a firm of local solicitors. The first letter contained the forged will.

In June 1998 Mrs Grundy was 81 years old but essentially sound in mind as well as body.

Her will was dated 9 June 1998. On that day, Mrs Grundy signed the research form in Shipman's consulting room. The doctor then asked two people in his waiting room to provide witness signatures.

‘I give all my estate, money and house to my doctor. My family are not in need and I want to reward him for all the care he has given to me and the people of Hyde.’

Two weeks later, on 23 June, Mrs Grundy consulted Shipman for a minor complaint.

He treated her, and the next morning at her home, he injected her on the pretext of taking a blood sample. Actually, he gave her a lethal dose of morphine.

When Mrs Grundy failed to show up a few hours later at a day centre, concerned friends went to her home and, finding the front door unlocked, entered to find Mrs Grundy dead, on the sofa. She was fully dressed and her body was already cold. (The suspicious funeral director had noted, as the Shipman Inquiry reported, that "many of the deceased were elderly women who had been found dead at home, apparently alone, fully dressed with no obvious sign of illness.")

On that very same morning, her will, signed and witnessed, arrived by post at a local solicitors' office. A week later, the solicitors received a second letter informing them that Mrs Grundy had died and that her daughter, Mrs Angela Woodruff, was at Mrs Grundy's premises. The letter-writer - F or S Smith - identified him- or herself as the person who had posted the will a few days earlier. The typing was identical on both letters - the keys on the typewriter had very distinctive characteristics.

The solicitors contacted Mrs Woodruff and sent her a copy of the will.

Herself a solicitor, Mrs Woodruff was surprised. She had her mother's earlier will, and it was inconceivable to her that her mother would make a new will without discussing it with her.

When she then discovered that this new will left everything to Dr Shipman and nothing at all to herself or her children ( Mrs Grundy’s grandchildren), Woodruff contacted the police.

Shipman was exposed quickly, easily and convincingly.

The police found the typewriter in his surgery. Fingerprint analysis showed that, although supposedly signed by three people, the will contained only one set of fingerprints - Shipman's.

The signatures were obvious forgeries, and experts quickly confirmed that supposition. In addition, Shipman had doctored Mrs Grundy's medical notes.

Luck also played a role: Crucially, and contrary to his instructions in the will, Mrs Grundy had been buried, not cremated.

Her body was exhumed, and it contained the drug that killed her – and helped convict Shipman. Had she been cremated, this important piece of evidence would have been lost.

What if...?

Did Shipman know that Mrs Grundy’s daughter was a solicitor? And what if she had not been a solicitor? Would Shipman have escaped detection?

He certainly took risk after risk with the various elements of his plot.

The typewriter was a smoking gun waiting to be detected - and there was plenty or reason to start detecting.

The will posted to a firm of local solicitors arrived on the very day the testator died.

The solicitors had not been acting for Mrs Grundy.

The person named Smith who sent the will and a followup letter was a shadowy figure bound to excite wonder if not suspicion.

The two witnesses to the will could easily be traced to examine the signatures on the will. They could also testify to the odd circumstances in which they provided their signatures in Shipman's surgery.

Especially risky was his posting of the will to arrive on the day he planned to kill Mrs Grundy.

What if Mrs Grundy had cancelled her home-visit appointment on that fateful and fatal day - preventing Shipman from seeing her?

Shipman would not have been able to administer the fatal dose of morphine, and he also would not have been able to intercept the will.

When the solicitors received the will from someone who was not a client, they were surprised but, in the event, filed the documents and did nothing for the time being. But an office clerk easily might have rung her seeking an explanation. If Mrs Grundy had learned that she has posted a will bearing her name and signature, Shipman's scam would have unravelled instantly.

Motiveless malignity?

With Mrs Grundy, greed motivated Shipman far more intensely than was usual for him. Her estate was worth more than £300,000, and he willed every penny of it to himself.

Financial gain played a relatively small role in in the vast majority of his murders.

After his arrest, police discovered and confiscated 70 items of jewellery in Shipman's garage - but the entire jewellery stash amounted to only about £10,000. Nor could the police determine that all of it had been stolen.

Shipman's wife Primrose demanded the return of the lot, but police suspected that Shipman stole at least some of the items. After a public appeal, a platinum and diamond ring was identified by, and returned to, its legal owner. Police then returned some items to Mrs Shipman and auctioned off others.

However, financial gain for his wife may have been a motive in the manner, and timing, of his own death.

Wilful to the very end

Shipman wrote his own will many years earlier, in 1979. He had two children at the time - two were born later - and his wife was his beneficiary.

He committed suicide in Wakefield Prison just before his 58th birthday and, importantly, two years shy of his 60th. He was no longer entitled to his own NHS pension, but if he died before reaching 60, his widow would be entitled to generous compensation.

According to the BBC, Shipman supposedly told his probation officer that he was considering suicide because his death would benefit his wife. After his death, Primrose Shipman received a pension and a lump-sum payment from the Department of Health.

UPDATE - SEPTEMBER 2009 Shipman made headlines again when it was announced that 65 letters he wrote while in prison were to be auctioned in November. Shipman sent the handwritten letters to a couple - friends and patients - in which he protested his innocence. The letters were discovered after their deaths by their son, who decided to auction them.

Shipman wrote the first letter in 1998 shortly after being imprisoned, and the last letter in 2004 about a month before he committed suicide. He maintained his innocence throughout the more than five-year correspondence.

But Shipman was clearly, incontrovertibly guilty of forging Mrs Grundy's will. Although the forged-will aspect of Shipman's crime is trivial when held up against his dastardly string of murders, its importance is underlined by the fact that Shipman's status as a serial murderer was established beyond reasonable doubt.

When the letter auction was announced, David Pollard, the coroner who presided over the inquests into the deaths of Shipman's victims, commented: "Shipman was arrogant about time, he was arrogant about the investigation, he was arrogant about the interviews which were carried out, he was arrogant about me."

And it was probably due to that overweening arrogance that Shipman displayed the sloppiness that ultimately led to his unmasking.